Melville Dewey, the inventor of the Dewey Decimal System, revolutionized library organization while embedding insidious racism by allocating less space to non-Christian religions and grouping diverse ethnic groups inadequately. Despite founding the American Library Association and encouraging women into librarianship, Dewey was a predatory sexual harasser who demanded applicants submit photos under the guise that "you cannot polish a pumpkin" and physically assaulted subordinates. His career ended in 1905 after resigning from the New York State Library for enforcing racist club rules excluding Jewish people, leading the American Library Association to remove his name from an award in 2019. Ultimately, this episode exposes how Dewey's obsession with efficiency masked deep-seated bigotry and predation, forcing a reevaluation of his legacy decades after his death in 1931. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Guaranteed Human Podcast Intro00:01:38
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Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
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Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
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On paper, the three hosts of the Nick Dick and Paul Show are geniuses.
We can explain how AI works, data centers, but there are certain things that we don't necessarily understand.
Better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Yes.
Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
I actually, I thought it was.
I got that wrong.
But hey, no one's perfect.
Dewey's Organizing Legacy00:15:18
We're pretty close, though.
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This is Amy Roebuck, alongside TJ Holmes from the Amy and TJ podcast.
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All right.
Hi, Robert.
All right, Sophie.
Is that dude?
Do we need to do anything else?
Nah.
All right.
Well, this is Behind the Bastards.
It's a podcast about the worst people of all of history.
This is our first recording session of 2020.
What year is it?
Jamie Lofton.
Two.
It's 2022.
2022.
Jamie, how is the new year treating you?
I mean, it's, it's already been a roller coaster.
The ups, the downs.
I wish I was kidding.
We just talked about it off my wild catch-up session.
And I guess we're just going to have to let the listeners fill in the blanks for themselves.
Yeah, this is behind the bastards.
This is behind the bastards.
Jamie, I just, I just, I missed you guys.
It's your brain, Jamie, is like a library of different screenwriters.
Jamie, speaking of that, how do you feel about libraries?
Do you understand the gif I said here yesterday now?
Do you like libraries?
Are you a big fan of libraries?
I like libraries.
I used to have, I used to scare my little brother with, okay, this is the reason my little brother is not very well read.
Sorry for calling him out, but when I loved libraries when I was a kid, and then I told my, I made, I made up a weird lie that I'm very proud of because I was very young when I made it up.
I told my little brother, yeah, I told my little brother that there's one book in every library and you don't know what book it is, but if you pull it off the shelf, the whole library blows up.
Oh, good.
That's a good one.
And then he didn't go to the library and didn't read books.
Oh, yeah.
That's a good one.
That's very proud of that.
That's very ambitious.
My favorite lie I've told a loved one is I convinced someone I cared about very much that the band Hansen had died in a terrible bus crash.
And then like a year later at a party, somebody brought up Hansen, or I think one of their songs started playing.
And the person I had told this lie to was like, oh, it's so sad that they died in that bus crash.
And it was the funniest moment in the world to me.
That is an incredible lie because it is believable.
Yeah, because where did Hansen go, right?
Yeah.
Right.
It kind of fell off.
Wow.
I would believe that.
I think that there would have been, and then I, because I know better, because I keep up with Hansen, I'd be like, that's not true.
But most people would believe that lie with them for the only way to really make yourself immune from those kind of lies is to spend a lot of time at the library.
Now, Jamie.
Yeah.
Have you ever heard of Melville Dewey?
Is that of the Dewey Decimal System, Dewey?
Yes.
Yep.
Yep.
I've heard of that.
I know nothing about him.
Is he bad?
He's a tremendous piece of shit.
This episode is titled Melville Dewey, Library Asshole.
And it's about Melville Dewey.
And this is going to be interesting to say here.
We're taking a little bit of a different sort of task than we do.
Most of our episodes are about bad people who do bad things, right?
But sometimes there are bad people who make broadly good things.
And the opposite is true, too, right?
Like you, look into the Atomic bomb project and a lot of the dudes who were like, responsible for that were basically decent men who were either like the war was so bad they thought it was, you know necessary, or they were just overwhelmed by scientific fascination.
They weren't like monsters, they were just like guys who, because of you know, wound up contributing, despite the fact that they were basically decent, to something that wound up being terrible.
That shit happens and the opposite happens.
Like people who are shitty can make good things, i'm sure, like big Cards W Bush's art, George W Bush's art um beautiful, Perfect Art, no notes yeah um, so this is a story about a terrible man whose influence was not entirely but like, probably broadly positive, although we'll talk about some ways in which the Dewey decimal system reinforces um racism um, which I did not know and I found fascinating um, but he was either.
He was an extremely influential man and his achievements were significant parts of the foundation of like, the global library systems.
Right so, like nations around the world that have national and public libraries, almost all of them, pretty much all of them, owe some sort of a debt to the way Melville Dewey, not just the Dewey decimal system, but other kind of library infrastructure.
He was one of the people who helped to come up with, I feel like, these bookstores as well, like don't use it directly, but definitely influenced by it.
Yeah I, there's probably a couple of billion people who have been alive that could credit some degree of their education, or at least their love of reading, to the work of Melville Dewey.
That's like a significant legacy for anybody.
Melville was also a real, real unpleasant motherfucker.
Um yeah, so Melville Lewis Kossuth Dewey was born on december 10th 1851 In Adams Center, upstate New York.
At the time, this was known as the Burned Over District due to the fact that successive waves of evangelical Christian movements had swept the area repeatedly during the half century before Melville's birth.
The burned over district gave us Mormonism, Millerism, the Oneida colony, huge influential chunks of the suffrage and abolitionist movement, as well as the temperance movement.
So it was like this is a place where a lot of these like major social movements in the U.S. kind of repeatedly, if it's not the only place where they start, it's one of the places where they really get their start.
It was also not an easy place to live.
This is not like comfortable country.
It's a hard, like if you think about like upstate New York and like what the weather is like there and how difficult it can be to subsist in like the winter there with modern technology.
It's like a rough motherfucking place to be a human being.
Even with modern technology, it fucking sucks.
There's difficulties.
Yeah.
One Wilson Library bulletin write-up that I found refers to it as hard-bitten country, quote, where survival was the goal and adherence to the basic codes of industry, frugality, and self-reliance were the guideposts.
In other words, Melville was born to a part of the world where influential people regularly set out to fundamentally change major aspects of the world around them.
And it was also a place where working people had thin margins for success or failure, and precision and efficiency were crucial.
So this is kind of what is molding him as a person: this place where, like, not only is this a place where people set out to change everything on a pretty regular basis, but also it's a place where you learn as a kid, you've got to be, your shit's got to be on point, you know?
Like, there's not fat margins here.
You have to be a high-achieving person in order to continue living.
To keep your house warm.
You have to be like industrious and shit.
You have to fucking on your shit to not die.
Right.
Okay.
That makes sense then for the region.
Yeah, it really does.
Melville's parents were bootmakers and boot sellers.
Now, some sources will claim that they were the hardest working people in town, although it's quite likely this has its origin in the various hagiographies of Dewey rather than objective reality.
I mean, that just sounds like an American origin story.
Yeah, they were the best at the thing.
They were the hardest workers in the town.
And, you know, maybe it's because he said that, and that's just he was the only person from his town who lived long enough that people cared about what he said about the past.
I don't know.
Well, as we all know, in this era, the best and the most shoes were coming out of my hometown, Brockton, Massachusetts, aka Shoe City.
So it's kind of hard to say that they were in the world.
It was Shoe Town, New Jersey.
Because it's Shoe City, Massachusetts, Robert.
Taxes.
So his parents were not very affectionate or emotionally engaged.
And Dewey inherited from them a maniacal work ethic and what some might call a robotic attitude towards productivity and efficiency.
Yeah, he's one of these people who's just like, he's like a machine the way that he works.
Now, at age five, he took it upon himself to take an inventory of his mother's spice cabinet.
He decided that she was basically a messy motherfucker and like, this isn't efficient at all.
You've done a terrible job of organizing your spice cabinet, mom.
And as a five-year-old, he rearranges everything without asking her.
This is the first story you'll hear about what will become a lifelong predilection for what he called self-improvement activities.
He's obsessed with organizing things, making them more efficient.
And even if I wonder if that is actually true, because that just sounds like something you would make up about the guy who would go on to invent the Dewey decimal system.
He couldn't stop organizing things.
It's like when you find out Chuck E. Cheese was an orphan and you're like, well, that's an interesting tale.
You mean Charles Alexander, Charles Entertainment Cheese?
Cheese, yes.
He was an orphan and then he became a rat who smoked a cigar.
You know, classic American origin story.
Yeah, really, really evidence of the faith.
Yeah, sorry.
Do you think he was organizing spices or do you think that that's kind of like a sound anthology?
So I have to think back to our Jeff Bezos episodes, which kind of start with very similar stories about him when he's like seven or eight years old doing this stuff, like grading his teachers and his parents and like this very analytical, like, and it's the same question I have.
With Bezos, I think it's a little more likely that the stories are real just because you hear them from, like, they come from people who were like his adults around him when he was a kid.
But so I don't know.
Like, maybe Dewey made them up, but also, like, maybe he and Bezos are just kind of similar people and there's kids who have that kind of mind.
But I think the fact that Dewey and Bezos, that like there's elements of their childhood, of like their behavior, their childhood isn't similar because Dewey grows up in a very difficult part of the world and Bezos does not.
But they both kind of have this organization brain where they're kind of obsessed with efficiency.
That does sound kind of similar to me.
And I kind of am inclined to think that there might be some truth to the spice cabinet story just because, yeah, there's people like that, you know?
Maybe.
Now, his parents were successful enough that they could afford to pay him for doing his chores.
The first product he remembered saving up to buy with his money was an unabridged dictionary, which he had to walk 10 miles in order to purchase.
That part of the story may be apocryphal, the 10 miles part, because Dewey was obsessed with the number 10.
And he may have retroactively inserted it into his past and later recollections because he was just like absolutely obsessed with the number 10 and with like decimals with base 10, like all this kind of shit.
He fucking loves 10.
Big, big, huge 10 nerd.
Yeah.
As a teenager, Melville extended his organizational mind to the family business.
From a 1981 write-up in the Wilson Library Bulletin, quote, he made a thorough analysis of his father's store, proved its business of inefficiencies, and made arrangements for the transfer of its inventory to its competitor down the street.
Apparently, Joel Dewey accepted his son's criticism.
He closed the store.
So his dad both made shoes and stole them.
And Dewey's like, this isn't efficient.
You should just be making shoes.
You're not good at selling them.
Like, let's have a competitor down the street sell the shoes and focus entirely on manufacturing.
And for whatever, whatever else is going on, his dad is like, yeah, I guess that makes sense.
See, for some reason, I do believe that over the spice story because I feel like there are some parents that, I don't know, I like, did my parents were asking me for a marriage advice way too young.
And like, they were just like, do you, how do you feel about how this is?
And I'm like, well, I'm six and I'm not having a good time, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, my parents asked me if they should cash their 401ks out to buy beanie babies.
And I said, absolutely.
You said, yes, this bubble is never going to burst, baby.
And that's why you're the world's most famous economist.
That's why I got them putting all their money into NFTs now.
Stop it.
So high school is when Dewey first grew obsessed with the number 10.
And it was, he learned about, so he's in high school and he learns about the metric system.
And he's just like, oh, this is so much better than the way that we count things in America.
I fucking love the metric system.
The thing that was particularly striking to him was that his birthday was December 10th, 1851, which was exactly 52 years after the French Assembly adopted the meter bar as a standard unit of measurement.
I don't know why he found that meaningful, but he found that intensely meaningful.
Whatever, go figure.
How do you even like that?
I don't know.
Well, I mean, that's an important moment in the development of the metric system, like deciding what a meter is, like that, that is meaningful.
I feel like that's like his version of astrology, though.
Some people have moments with astrology where they're like, yes, this means this, means this, means this.
And this is just like his weirdo version of that.
Yeah, he just, he fucking loves the metric system.
He loves decimal shit.
He loves the number 10.
He's just, it's a thing for him.
That's his father, son, Holy Ghost.
Yeah, it's fine.
When he was 16, Melville started attending the Hungerford Collegiate Institute, which is a college prep school.
Now, this is a period, kind of the mid to late 1800s.
This is when college starts to become vastly more common, right?
For a long time, it had just been like you had, if you were very rich and powerful, if you were in the aristocracy, you would go to college and like a man, obviously.
The 1800s is when that starts to change.
And college becomes something that like the middle class and like people who are rich, but not of the aristocracy can reasonably expect to experience.
The number of colleges.
Wait a second.
Yeah.
We extorted every class for this semi-useful thing.
I don't know if they're even extorting it because, right, like it is, I think, more reasonably.
I don't know how it is at this point.
I know when my parents went to college, it was the kind of thing you could accidentally pay for if you had a decent job bartending.
Yeah, by the time my parents went to school.
Yeah, the number of colleges.
It's just fair.
I think it is.
I don't think it's quite.
I think it is still pretty expensive at that point.
Obviously, there's not as many colleges.
The number of colleges actually doubles in the first half of the 1800s.
And so by the time Melville starts prep school, it's become much more common to go to college, but it was still not the norm for teen boys to prepare for higher learning.
In fact, the fact that he goes to high school means that he's gotten more education than most kids probably could expect to get in the United States.
My fucking grandfather never made it past the fourth grade because the Great Depression happened, right?
Like that wasn't abnormal in that period.
Sure.
So the fact that he makes it to this is both a mark of the fact that his family has some money.
They're certainly not rich, but like they're comfortable enough that they can afford this sacrifice.
Graduation Present Cufflinks00:02:32
And also he's obviously brilliant.
You do not in this period of time, just for bragging rights, put your kid in this kind of program.
You do it if they're like, well, this kid has a mind that everyone around us has noted, and we have to get him into a college.
This kid's doing shit with spices since he was 16.
Kids organizing spices, get him into college.
Yeah.
So during his first year of prep school, there's a terrible fire in the building.
And Dewey risks his life to rescue not other classmates, but as many armloads of books as he can manage.
And he almost dies doing this.
Like, that's how dedicated this kid is to books, which I do find admirable, honestly.
I would rescue people first, but I don't know that they're going to be able to do it.
I was going to say, I mean, there is an asterisk, but that, but, you know, at its core.
They may have all gotten out.
I didn't hear that anyone died in the fire.
I don't know.
That would be funny if he was running past people who are burning alive.
Kicking people to get books out.
No, we got to get these R.L. Steins out of here.
He was an author in the 1800s, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
But yeah, he inhales enough smoke, saving as much of the library as he could that he gets bedridden for like six months.
And his doctor actually warns his parents that he's probably going to die.
Obviously, he does not.
Are you really going to be like a great person one day, quote unquote, if you don't have a long childhood illness?
That is such a common thing.
You're just going to lay in bed and be like, wow, life really is fragile, isn't it?
And then you go on to do the most horrific shit you can think of.
Yeah, I think this, like, I think it's worth noting that like, I think probably most kids have a near-death experience in the mid-1800s, right?
You know?
I would have such a failure complex if I had a long childhood illness and then went on to be a regular person because it just seems like you have to be like proust after that.
I don't know.
Yeah, that's the only way.
That's why we have so many prouds.
So for Dewey, this experience drives home the almighty importance of efficiency.
He believes that death could come at any time, which obviously it can, and you needed to get as much done as possible before you die.
Before he graduates from high school, Dewey gives a speech to his classmates about how wasting time is immoral.
As a graduation present, he buys himself cufflinks.
Sorry, that wasn't nice.
No, it's not.
As a graduation present, he buys himself cufflinks inscribed with the letter R, which meant reformer.
So there you go.
Now, okay.
I'm going to get a teacher that says, I'm going to get a bunch of A's.
I'm like, it's because I'm awesome.
What a weird man.
Immoral Wasted Time Speech00:05:12
All right.
He's a weird man.
Also, like, whatever.
Nothing bad yet.
Yeah.
No, I'm just hearing a weird teenager is on the loose.
He's definitely a little bit of a weird teenager, right?
Yeah.
A weird virgin is on the loose, which does not usually lead to good things, I will say.
Oh, Reddit's going to get angry at that one, Jamie.
Cut it out, Chris.
Cut it out.
I don't want them to get mad.
You know what else Reddit gets angry about, Jamie?
Oh, what?
The products and services for this podcast.
They do, probably.
I mean, please don't yell at me, Reddit.
I'm sorry I called weird virgins.
Jamie loves virgins.
No, don't.
I can't say that.
Do whatever you want.
Do whatever you want.
Or don't do whatever you want.
Or don't do whatever you want.
Sure.
Now I'm flashing my R cufflinks so you know that I'm serious.
There you go.
All right.
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He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
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Racist Library Classification System00:13:30
Oh, man.
We are some products.
And it might have been a service or two, to be honest.
Service or two.
Yeah.
Can't say it.
I can't say it wasn't a service or two.
That I certainly wouldn't argue.
So we've got a teen on the loose.
We got a teen on the loose.
Melville Dewey is out in the motherfucking wild.
And by the wild, I mean Alfred University.
That's where he gets accepted after high school.
Before he leaves home, he changes his name from Melville, M-E-L-V-I-L-L-E, you know, the way that people spell Melville, to M-E-L-V-I-L, which he considered more efficient.
No way.
Oh, this goes real far, Jamie.
Yeah.
Trimmed off the last two letters?
He trimmed off two letters.
Yeah, to make it more efficient.
You don't need that last L and E. You can pronounce Melville fine without them.
It's like genetically, it still works.
It's just wasted time and space.
I'm kind of loving him.
I feel like at this phase in his life, I feel like we would have been friends in high school.
I feel like I would have been exhausted by him, but I am exhausted by him just reading about him.
So as a university student, he continues his old habits.
He was offended by the fact that many of his classmates smoked cigars, which he thought was financially inefficient.
And he calculated that their smoking habits would cost them each an average of $15,000 over the course of a lifetime.
He tried to tell people this, but I don't think it actually made anyone stop smoking.
No, it just got his ass beat.
What?
It's weird.
And Bezos did kind of the same thing with his fucking grandma.
You're right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Jesus.
It's just this like, just a lot of people do.
It's the 18 fucking, what, like 60s?
Like, life is terrible.
People smoke cigars.
Yeah, chips.
Top.
And it's got to suck for most of that.
Let them smoke.
They're not going to live long enough to get throat cancer.
Come on.
They're going to die because they touched a nail wrong.
So at any rate, Dewey quickly transferred to Amherst College.
He was inspired by their physical education program, which was one of the best in the world.
But once he gets there, he doesn't actually enroll in any sports classes.
The only athletic course he took was horseback riding because it was more efficient, because it would get him to class faster.
Oh my God.
Which is like a weird series of decisions to make.
I want to love it.
I mean, I love a singular goal.
Yeah.
Efficiency.
I mean, this one is going to, you can already tell the goal of efficiency is going to is going to slide at some point and get very scary.
But right now, it's still fun.
I would also argue that horseback riding isn't a sport.
Look, there are two sports.
One of them is that game they play in Afghanistan with goatheads on horseback where they kill each other sometimes.
And the other is, I don't know.
Hot dog eating.
Hot hog eating.
Nothing else is a sport.
Fuck you if you disagree.
You know, that's what I got to say.
That's the official stance.
PE does not wind up appealing to him in practice, but Amherst had another boom, another boon for him.
It had a kind of shitty library that didn't have enough employees to keep it organized.
And this is sort of this thing that you see in a lot of really successful people where they find like a system they're interested in and they find like it's not being it if it like they find it neglected.
I think if he'd gone to a college with a better library, his life might have been totally different.
But the best thing that happens is that Amherst's library kind of sucks and it's kind of underfunded because they're so into PE.
So he's able to apply for a job there and he gets one and immediately sets to reforming the way the library is organized.
This is like a hugely influential part of his life that Amherst hadn't put much time into it.
So he started this like as a teenager.
Yeah, I mean, I think he, yeah, he's got to be like 19 or 20, you know, when he gets into this.
And I'm going to read a quote from that write-up in the Wilson Library bulletin.
In that era, library books often were housed according to a numbering system that indicated the floor, aisle, section, and shelf on which they were stored.
Whenever rearrangement was necessary, all of the books had to be reclassified.
Perceiving the amount of time wasted not only in finding books when they were needed, but in their necessary and frequent reclassification, Dewey was determined to devise a simple, workable, and permanent classification system.
While attending a chapel service at Amherst, he suddenly conceived of the idea of using a system of Arabic numerals with decimals for book classification.
The scope of the plan put all printed human knowledge into the 10 classifications of a numerical system ranging from 000 to 900 and made use of as many decimals within each group as were needed to define adequately the content of the book being classified.
I mean, I'm guessing it has something to do with the way like Bible verses are numbered that started this.
Like that would be my guess as to why it happens in a chapel.
But this is like, it makes sense.
You know, he's the guy.
It makes sense based on what we know of his childhood that like this is the thing he decides to do.
It literally sounds like the culmination of everything he's given a shit about his entire life.
Yeah.
Now, Dewey was 21 years old when he invented the Dewey decimal system.
He was very quickly, people very much immediately recognized, oh, this is a way better way to have a library be organized.
And he's given a job.
Do you know how it was organized before?
Yeah, I just said that.
I just said the previous way.
Okay.
Yeah.
The previous way was like books, like books had a numbering system that like told you where in the library in that specific library they were stored.
Right.
Which meant that like when you have to reclassify everything regularly when you change the library or like if you get a bunch of new stuff and like every library has a different system.
So you never know where to find things.
If you go from one library to the other, it's a totally different system.
Okay.
So this is just like standardized it and anybody could use it.
Yeah.
It standardizes it.
It makes it much simpler and easier for anyone to find books.
If you know, you don't have to know the library.
If you know the system, you can find the books, right?
And people at Amherst are immediately like, oh, this is a fucking great idea.
So he's given a job.
He's like promoted and is now like helping to run the entire library.
And he spends the next couple of years refining his idea until he was ready to patent it in 1876.
Dewey's innovation was immediately appreciated, and his 40-page manifesto spread rapidly among institutes of higher learning who adopted it one by one.
So, so far, so good, right?
Like, he comes up with a better way to make libraries be organized.
Everybody is pretty much instantly like, well, this is great.
And they do.
I mean, yeah, we still have, you know, efficiency manifesto.
But yes.
Yeah.
I'm not saying he would have been a fun dude at a party, but like, so far, pretty reasonable guy.
In terms of the work, it seems like he's doing good stuff.
Yeah.
Nobody has any qualms with Dewey at this point.
Here's the problem, though.
And this is a problem with the system he devises.
I don't know how much you want to categorize it as a moral problem because a lot of this is the result of the culture he's raised in.
Where do moral problems go in the Dewey Decimal System?
Was there not a section?
We're about to talk about that a lot.
Oh, no.
Dewey didn't just see himself as creating a way to organize knowledge.
The system he devised was deeply tied in with his beliefs about hierarchy.
And I'm going to quote from the website Book Riot here.
It's important to remember the reasons that Dewey wanted public libraries to be a thing in the first place.
He was no altruist.
He believed that people and concepts belonged in certain places in society and that in those places they must stay.
Poor people, for example, needed to be content with non-unionized factory work.
Christianity was the only real religion.
As for non-white people, was there really a need to address them at all?
Now, these are not radical beliefs at the time, but Dewey's status as an innovator allowed him to codify them into the structure of libraries.
And we can see this today in how the Dewey Decimal System treats religions.
Book Riot continues: quote, the 200s encompass all religion nominally, although the problems with this premise are obvious.
Each Dewey heading encompasses 10 major subjects, dividing each up by subtopics that add digits to the end of the number.
Six of the 10 subjects in the 200s are explicitly for Christianity-related subjects.
Three of those remaining are either explicitly or implicitly Judeo-Christian.
Finally, at the bottom of the heap, the 290s cover other religions.
Islam, Baha'i, and Babism all get to share 297.
Germanic religions get 293.
All religions of Indic origins, in other words, Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism, get to share 294.
Hinduism gets all of 294.5 to itself.
How generous.
299 covers everything else.
And we're going to focus on this a bit because it's the most glaring example of racism in the Dewey Decimal System.
You see where I'm going with this.
Religions Dewey associated with people of color ended up with way less space than the real faith.
Not convinced?
Fine.
There's a section in the 200s just for black people.
The entire 299.6 subdivision is for religions originating among black Africans and people of black African descent.
In fact, everything about African religion of Haitians in Haiti can be fit into 299.6.6097294, according to the DDS.
Because at some point, someone, for some reason, decided that Haitian religions originating from black people were not as important as Germanic religions originating from white ones.
Well, it's like we know who decided that, correct?
I mean, parts of it were, I don't even think he thought about Haitian religions, right?
So like he devises this system.
Aspects of it are kind of like codified by other people, but he does kind of start this trend.
This is fascinating because it's like we've both walked past this problem a million times and never really considered it.
This is like, yeah, the biases are so, so glaring.
Wow.
Okay.
Sorry, continue.
This is why.
Yeah.
And I've heard it argued that this is less of an issue now for a variety of reasons, largely due to computers and the way that's kind of changed how libraries work.
But for decades, book catalogers would have to print or write the actual numbers of the Dewey numbers on the spine of a book.
It was rarely practical to write a cutter number as long as, say, 0.6097294, right?
You just don't have the room.
So catalogers would chop that number down to three or four digits.
So a book about Haitian religion would get sliced down to 299.609 or 299.6, which would mean it gets lumped in with all black religions.
Now, this is gross, but it also has really practical concerns.
Quote, once local cataloging conventions reduce it to 299.609 or 299.6, its author's last name will determine where it goes on the shelf.
At that point, it won't be with other books about Haitian religion.
So people who look for it will need to comb through every book about black non-Abrahamic religions alphabetically by author.
Instead of using the system as a discovery tool, they'll need to know exactly what they're looking for, right down to the correct spelling of the author's last name.
Thus do people of color get lost in the Dewey system.
The problem with the 200s occurs again in the 300s, where almost everything about people of color can be classified under 305.8, ethnic and national groups.
Within this subheading, Germanic peoples, again, get a relatively clean cutter, 305.82 to be exact.
Meanwhile, 305.895 covers all East and South Asian peoples.
You can probably extrapolate the problems with stuffing close to 2 billion people.
One little thing with literally hundreds of it for a minute, you're like, oh, of course, colonialism and like all of this person's like deeply held prejudices are naturally filtering into this system, but it's just not one I've ever thought about for more than a minute, I guess.
It's the kind of thing.
It is the kind of thing where when we talk about like what makes someone a bastard, does his goal was not to exclude people of color.
His goal was not to reinforce racism.
He was just trying to organize books.
And he was also a guy who just did not think about this kind of thing.
And it was because he was very much in the biases of the system.
He was not, I believe, he was not in this.
He was not being actively racist.
It's more a matter of like because of who he is and the culture he comes from and the fact that he's very much bought into that culture, he doesn't think about any of these things.
And his racism winds up getting in like winds up being part of structurally the system that organizes libraries.
Right.
I mean, it's like a different kind of insidious because it, yeah, I agree with you.
It's like it doesn't sound like anything, at least anything he's not hateful for.
Like this is not the result of him being hateful.
It's a result of like he just doesn't think about these people, you know?
And yeah, and it's, I feel like it's a strong case for why systems like this, and obviously it's like, it's like what we're talking about.
One of the things that we're talking about.
But like systems like this, it can't be just one guy making them because then it's just going to reflect the worldview of one guy.
Yeah.
Like, yeah.
And this is, this is, and it's, I'm kind of making this.
I'm not trying to like, we need to be fair to Dewey.
I'm trying to say like this alone, I wouldn't have a behind the bastards on Dewey, even though this is a really significant, probably some of the bastards we've done have done, have contributed less evil to the world than this kind of structural racism in the Dewey system.
Intentionally or not.
But there was no, there was no, there needs to be some sort of intent, some sort of actual evil for me to like really want to dig into someone in this way.
Sexual Harassment in Archives00:15:32
And that's coming.
That is not this part of it.
Because again, this is more the result of just he's a racist like everyone else, but not hateful.
I will say that I did read the first paragraph of his Wikipedia page.
And so I feel like I have a little charcuterie board of what's to come.
Oh boy, some fun stuff, Jamie.
Wow, wow, wow.
Does that paragraph end not like I was expecting?
It's quite a tale, the story of Melville Dewey.
So obviously, this is when we talk about the harms Dewey perpetuated.
This is the big one, right?
And this is a really significant harm.
But we haven't got to the part yet where he is choosing actively to hurt people.
That's a coming.
So in 1876, Dewey left Amherst for Boston.
By this point, his interest in efficiency had expanded to developing an entirely new, more efficient system of spelling, which he claimed could cut three years off from the time necessary to educate a child.
He wrote in one paper, and I'm going to read what he's saying first, and then I'm going to read how it's spelled, okay?
He wrote, just think of what else you could learn in those years.
And he spelled it J-S-T, think is spelled normally.
Of is spelled U-V and instead of O-F, which I don't understand how that's more efficient.
What is spelled W-A-T.
Else is spelled E-L-S.
U is, of course, spelled with just the letter U. Could is spelled C-U-D.
Learn and in are spelled normally.
And then those is spelled T-H-O-Z.
Years is Y-R-N.
So like a lot of it is him like texting, basically.
He sounds like he's on Donald.
It's really funny.
He's so like the library guy like spells like a 16-year-old texting in 2004.
It's very funny.
He's curating a Lolita fashion blog.
Yeah, it's extremely funny.
It's so funny.
Holy shit.
And like all of his personal letters are like this.
They all read like he's a high school student when like Hannah Montana is on TV.
Like it's very funny.
What's up?
Melville here is spelling.
I hate that he's a bastard.
That's so fucking funny.
It's extremely funny.
It's extremely funny that like the father of libraries hated spelling with a passion.
I think that's, see, that's the kind of edgelord attitude I can get behind.
And you'll notice here, again, he spelled of, O F, U, V, which isn't more efficient, but that's the reason he hated the original spelling of it.
His issue with English isn't just that it's inefficient.
He also doesn't like the way a lot of words are spelled.
He doesn't think it makes any sense.
I think that that's a reasonable argument, though.
Yeah.
I mean, sure.
Yeah.
In 1886, he creates a group called the Spelling Reform Association out of a desire to regularize American spelling.
That's the line.
That's the line, right?
That's a bit much.
How does he spell the spelling reformer?
How does he spell?
I mean, it was spelled normally where I found it, but I'm sure he had his ideas.
I bet that they're all like numerals and emojis.
Yeah.
Very funny.
He would have loved emojis.
This is so efficient.
He would have loved.
He's like, an entire emotion for Italians in one emoji.
Oh, God.
So in this quest, he was less successful.
People do not jump on the spell like Melville Dewey train.
At one point, Dewey shortens his surname to DUI, which he has to give up, I think, because his bank won't recognize his checks.
But it's funny.
Like, theoretically, if people had agreed to let him do this, we would all be talking about the DUI decimal system, which I find funny.
That is funny.
And it also is, I mean, I feel like, again, it's like he's just so wildly ahead of his time in naming conventions and spelling specifically because you're describing like internet talk and like how SoundCloud rappers.
He's readable on the internet.
Yeah.
He would have been a great SoundCloud rapper for sure.
I think that that's safe to say.
Yes, for sure.
Yeah.
He and XXX Tentation, whatever that guy's name was, would have been best friends.
No, they wouldn't have.
He was very racist.
So, Jesus Christ.
Continue the story, please.
Yeah.
Melville launches a company to sell library supplies, including the hanging vertical file.
This is when he moves to Boston.
And he invents the hanging vertical file, which is a big part of his family.
Did he like file cabinet shit?
Kind of, I think.
Yeah.
In his first year in the city, he organized a librarian convention that led directly to the founding of the American Library Association, which exists to this day.
He helps to found the ALA.
The convention is where he meets his wife, Annie Godfrey, who is a librarian from Wellesley University.
Now, the fact that he meets his wife at a professional convention as a co-worker and then hits on her and marries her was not seen as problematic at the time.
But I did find an excerpt from a glowing write-up in 1981 of Melville Dewey that talks about this and has what you might notice some red flags in it.
Okay.
Dewey attended the event, as did Annie Godfrey, the librarian at Wellesley College.
The single-purposed business-like Mr. Dewey did not surprise those of his acquaintance who recognized him as a ladies' man when he later married this young woman.
Now, 1981, none of the bad stuff about Dewey is really popularly talked about.
He's still kind of lauded as the hero of library world.
But as a general rule, not always, because to talk about Jeff Bezos, met his wife at work.
She insists she was the one who started things.
I've never heard any evidence of him being creepy to people at work.
Bill Gates, on the other hand, also meets his wife at work.
A ton of women found him very creepy at work.
There's no shortage there.
So just the fact that he meets his wife at a library convention, not inherently creepy, but spoilers, he's a creepy sex pest.
Yeah.
He is not a ladies' man.
He is a sexual harasser.
But I do, I do see, I mean, I think that ladies' man was code for sexual harassment at the Columbia.
It's probably fair to say.
Very, very recently.
Yeah.
Maybe the past five years even.
Yeah.
Now, I get ahead of myself a little bit, though.
So Dewey founds the American Library Journal around the same time, which he edits.
And his ideas through this journal kind of sweep through the field.
He continues after starting the decimal system to have a huge influence on the, because this is the period in which libraries are really becoming like a thing in public and not just in the United States.
And he is maybe the most influential person in this period.
He's a library influencer.
He literally is Gen Z, but he's going to get canceled.
He's, oh boy, is he going to get canceled, Jamie?
Jamie, what happened?
We'll get into the way he gets canceled.
It's pretty remarkable.
Okay.
So pretty soon, though, his ideas sweep the field.
And in quick order, his decimal system and his other innovations are standard, not just nationwide, but all over the world.
It starts to happen.
In 1883, he gets a job at Columbia University and he moves his family to New York so he could found the Columbia School of Library Economy.
Now, this was probably Dewey's great feminist icon moment because he encourages women to apply to Columbia to become librarians, even though women are banned from attending the school.
Yeah, this 1981 article, the Wilson Library Bulletin article, which is very positive towards him, notes, Dewey was firmly convinced that women were destined to become librarians and that his goal was to help them achieve this destiny.
He simply ignored the rules and he seemed oblivious to the fact that his endeavor was further frowned upon because his enrollment questionnaire, which obviously had not been screened by higher authorities, required information as to the applicant's weight, height, and color of hair and eyes, as well as the suggestion that a photograph be included.
I know, right?
I was like, that's the start.
It's like, oh, he's fighting for women to be able to have a career.
That's, oh, no, no, no, no.
And he's so, oh, God, that's fascinating, too, because it's like, I mean, it's just, it just takes one pervert to change an industry, doesn't it?
Because you do like associate, I feel like almost, I mean, I at least associate librarian as a traditionally feminine job.
But also it is like a highly skilled job and requires a lot of training and degrees.
And it's because he was horny.
It's because he's horny.
One could argue.
It's broadly speaking positive that he's this horny weirdo and thus does this.
It is horny for good.
I presented on a outcome of this is more positive than negative.
And this is stating the obvious, but systemically, someone shouldn't have some weird guy shouldn't have to get horny for women to get a college education.
No, of course not.
Of course not.
But I see what you're saying.
Yeah.
And when he's asked to explain why he requires photographs for applicants to the library program, his explanation is, you cannot polish a pumpkin.
Can you unpack that for me?
Yeah.
If they're ugly, he doesn't want to let them in the program.
That's what that means.
Yeah.
That reminds me of when I was working on a Kathy podcast, there was like this whole, and this is like talk from like the 70s and 80s, like this, whatever, this attitude existed until very recently of like secretaries, also like front-facing skilled jobs that are underpaid and traditionally by women.
And like, yeah, this whole concept of like, you have to have a front desk look, like you have to like you looking good makes the whole business more appealing, even though it's like, well, you're just, you're doing a skilled job.
You shouldn't have to also worry about making some weird guy horny and dealing, but it sounds like that's going to be a big problem, right?
Yeah, nobody, nobody asks me to look nice to do my job.
I do, but you ignore it.
I definitely do.
I keep sending you emails.
I should be fired.
I'm like, Robert.
It's a rumbling piece of shit most days.
So the fact that Melville Dewey decided that women were destined to be librarians had a number of reverberating positive impacts.
For generations, the field was a way for independent women to find work and a way to support themselves independent of a father or a husband.
The career field provided opportunities for single women and mothers.
Like a lot of, I think a lot of women who are like not straight are able to find ways to be more independent because this is a career path that are open to them.
And to this day, about 79% of librarians are women.
Like, right?
It's very positive that there is a professional, reasonably well-paid way job that is seen as like a job a woman can get.
That isn't that like that's good in this time.
Gives you access to higher education?
Yeah right absolutely, that's positive.
Nothing, yeah.
And he does get fired from Columbia for accepting women because that's not their policy.
Um, like so he's.
He was so horny he got fired.
He was so horny he got fired for equality.
Um, and he's also like a suffrage advocate later in life.
Like that's not, he's not.
I know, I know he's not horny, he's not all horny, but he's largely horny.
Um, and he was.
He was definitely not a believer.
Basic mental equality between men and women.
Um, in an 1886 speech titled librarianship as a profession for college-bred women and we'll talk about that term in a second Dewey noted that while women who had been bred well enough to get a college education were intelligent, could be librarians, they were not reliable employees.
He warned that they were likelier to get sick or to quit the job to pursue a home life.
This wasn't a reason not to hire Them, he argued, but it was reason to pay them less than men for the same work.
He added that men deserved more money because they were better able to, quote, lift a heady, heavy case or climb a ladder.
There were many uses for which a stout corduroy is really worth more than the finest silk.
Oh, okay, and also always says his like bigoted statement in the creepiest way possible.
Stout corduroy and the finest silk corduroy and the finest silk.
I'm like, oh, God.
I mean, I'm going to stop calling him a virgin.
But like, you know, he's married.
I just, yeah, that's gross.
That's queer.
It is, it is, it is definitely a way to describe your sexism that seems unique to me.
I'm sure other dudes in the time were doing it.
It's fascinating.
I mean, I mean, speaking of Reddit, men on Reddit are describing genders like that as we speak.
They're slapping their hands across.
He would have killed it.
This guy would have killed it on the internet in all the worst ways.
My question is, how did that pay breakdown work?
Do you have any information on that?
Like how much less were specific breakdowns on this.
And I don't think he was advocating in numbers.
He was just saying, like, of course, you're not going to pay women as much to do that.
Oh, he was like, well, obviously, women shouldn't be paid equal for equal work.
Yeah.
But that doesn't believe it's equal work because they can't lift.
Sheesh.
Now, starting in the 1880s, and continuing for nearly half a century, Dewey also engaged in a pattern of behavior against his female colleagues that his biographer, Wayne Wygand, described as, quote, unwelcome hugging, unwelcome touching, and certainly unwelcome kissing.
In a 2018 interview with the American Libraries magazine, Wigand said this: Was there an element of power in his behavior?
There was.
To my knowledge, he never squeezed a woman who was his equal.
It was usually subordinates.
And when Weigand says equal, he's not being sexist.
He's talking about like within the structures of the institutions, right?
Right.
So not only is he sexually harassing women, but he's only sexually harassing women who are lower positioned than him in the organizations that they work in.
I mean, and not that it's okay, like that's like because it's like you shouldn't sexually harass anyone, but that implies a level of strategy too to like women who cannot retaliate.
That makes it more predatory, right?
Like it's more predatory if you are going, if you are thinking about the position of the women that you are sexually harassing, you know?
Yeah.
And I mean, and he's a very like, I mean, just based on what we know about him and how his brain works, he's a very deliberate and strategic person.
And I think it stands to reason that he would have thought somebody else.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
This is further, we don't have as, you know, the kind of granular detail, obviously, you get about a guy like Harvey Weinstein and what he was doing because this is happening in the 1880s, you know, like you, you just don't have most of these reports.
But the information we do get, I think, makes it clear that he is predatory in his behavior towards.
It feels like he feels like you should have his reports because he writes like he's IMing people, but you don't.
We do have a lot.
Like it is a mark of what a sexual harasser he was that we have quite a bit of detail of a guy sexually harassing women in the late 1800s and early 1990s.
I was going to say this is kind of unusual to hear of sexual harassment with detail from this era specifically.
This is another important thing worth noting.
The racism that kind of gets baked into the Dewey decimal system that's in his head is not exceptional for his time.
The level to which he sexually harasses women is seen by his peers as exceptional and unsettling.
That in the 1880s.
In the late 1800s, women can't vote.
Yeah.
And other dudes are being like, this guy is really not, this is not okay.
Baked-In Racism and Prey00:10:23
Putting their arms around their wives, they force to marry them, being like, babe, I'd never do that to you.
Yeah.
Oh, my God.
Like, that is the kind of sexual harasser that he is.
Like it is noted at the time as being exceptional.
That's cool.
Yeah, in 1905, Melville takes a cruise to Alaska with a number of his colleagues at the American Library Association.
This is after a big convention.
The cruise was meant as a place for them to like, they had this big convention.
Now we're going to kind of start laying out our plans for next year.
And over the course of a few days, Dewey, who is, I should note, six feet tall, which is very tall for the time, sexually harasses and like physically goes after four different female ALA members on a cruise ship.
God.
Now, I do feel comforted by the fact that I'm the same height as him because I'm looking at a picture of him.
Oh, you could kick his ass.
No, you're not.
I was like, I could kick this guy's ass.
No problem.
Not even an issue.
Because again, motherfucker didn't lift.
So over the course.
In spite of the fact that he was a stout corduroy, he couldn't clip for shit.
The impact of Dewey's sexual harassment is perhaps best illustrated by the story of Adelaide Haas, who is to this day, like now a very influential, like helps, I think to a similar extent to Dewey, build the concept of like how libraries function and what a librarian should do.
There's like books about her.
She's like a very influential female librarian.
I've never heard of her.
Yeah, I mean, librarians, right?
Like how much do you hear about influential librarians as a rule?
But yeah, that's true.
But I think people might want to look into Adelaide Haas if you're interested in this history.
And she, when early on in her career, she crosses paths with Melville, also in 1905.
And I'm going to read a quote from history.com about what happens next.
As a young woman, she struggled to be taken seriously by mostly male executive boards.
She created a groundbreaking new way to classify government documents and was disappointed when a male colleague claimed the credit.
But armed with a new job at the New York Public Library, a better salary, and an ambitious new project, she finally felt optimistic about her career.
To pull off her newest plan, she'd need support.
So she approached the leading voice in the field, Melville Dewey, a man whose innovations made him a household name.
He suggested they meet privately about her new project.
Encouraged, she made her way to Albany, New York, only to find that he had arranged what amounted to a weekend-long date.
It's unclear what happened next, but Haas departed hastily after being taken for a long drive by Dewey and later spoke to colleagues about how offensive his behavior had been.
Well, I think that that's, I mean, I know that that's not very specific.
Oh, God.
Yeah.
Again, we don't know exactly what happened, but I found an article from American Libraries magazine that does go into more detail.
It cites from a letter Dewey wrote to Haas later, in which he complained that she had ran away so suddenly, but also stated, I am very glad that I know you better.
Sometimes I think of you as Shakespeare's Cordelia, for your voice is hers.
Sometimes as Bruhilda, fair, blue-eyed Saxon.
So he does not get the message.
No, this is, oh, God.
This is like, I mean, it's chilling and bad.
And also, I'm like, I just, I am stuck on like, I am shocked that records from this era exist of this kind of behavior.
And it does so closely mirror stories from it's exactly the same shit.
It's exactly the same shit.
That is like this is Harvey Weinstein's shit.
What Haas went through?
Like, this is exactly the same shit.
Yeah.
It's just like creepy, misspelled letters instead of emails.
Like, it's just, I mean, it is like, you know, this is all, but this is like kind of an interesting example of like, and we have every receipt for some reason.
Yeah, I mean, obviously not all.
I'm sure there are probably a couple, probably, I mean, dozens to hundreds of women who we don't have the stories of that Dewey in some way mistreated.
But we know we have some of Haas's story, in part because she became a very significant figure in her own right.
And her biographer noted in it.
Oh, I was about to say that that always makes a difference, too.
She's a person of note, then she'll always, you know, like, and that's not a slight against her.
It's just like when, when women and or like victims in general, like, if they're not someone that worth talking about, people don't talk about them.
Yeah, it's one of the value.
It's one of the ways in which a woman who's been through that experience, like a positive to being famous, is that you can help make it clear by your experience how many people who are not famous have gone through something similar.
And that's positive.
Yeah.
Her biographer noted in 2018 that the way Dewey referred to her there with the lurid romantic mythical descriptions was not at all the normal style for co-ed communication between librarians.
He's like, this is not even men who are probably guilty of a lot of gross behavior themselves.
They don't write to their female colleagues this way.
Like, this is weird.
This stands out within, I'm a dude, I'm a biographer who reads a lot of letters from librarians to librarians.
I ain't seen anything else like this.
Right.
Like, this is egregiously harassment.
Yeah.
Adelaide decides, though, not to take any action against him.
And she explains to one colleague in a letter, we are a professional body, the members of which, encountering obnoxious personal traits in fellow members, must content ourselves to employ those defenses which reason, training, and character dictate.
So she's like, we need to defend against this guy.
We need to warn women about him, stop him from, but we can't like make a big thing about it, right?
That's, I mean, that's like a classic whisper that's like, yeah, it's like you can't, it's the system in which it's like, well, we don't have any faith that anyone in an authoritative position is going to advocate for us.
So we have to protect ourselves and just like, or we're going to, or, and it's like, that's a, especially in this era, that's a reasonable concern for her of like, if I speak up, I'm going to lose my job.
That's a reasonable concern in 2022.
Like, this is 1905, you know?
Yeah.
Like, that makes total sense.
And it's also still so depressing.
God.
God.
Well, there's actually, it's about to get a little less depressing briefly because it would be wrong to say that knowledge of Dewey's improprieties was an open secret because that would imply it was secretive in any kind of way.
Like it was well known to everybody that he was this kind of dude.
On one occasion, his son and daughter-in-law, Godfrey and Marjorie Dewey, move out of the family house because Dewey's own son felt the need to get his wife away from his father because the sexual advances his father was making towards his daughter-in-law were so constant and uncomfortable.
Like, that is the level of, like, that's another level, right?
Of like, that is, yeah, yeah, that's another level of sex.
I mean, it's like that your daughter-in-law, who you live with, and your, that's, yeah, that's like, that's very, very sick.
It would be hard to exaggerate the degree to which this guy is a creep.
Like, okay.
Like, he's a Weinstein level offender, even if we don't have that amount of detail.
He's, he has to be.
Like, yeah.
I mean, if there's this much information from so long ago, like, yeah.
And I think the fact that he's like sexually harassing his own daughter-in-law, that also makes the case that like it's compulsive for him.
Like, he's, he's doing it to like every chance he gets, pretty much.
I mean, there's a degree, I think, of calculation, but like, yeah.
I mean, it just does seem like anyone that he thinks he can get away with this behavior from, he will prey on.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, Dewey was fairly open about his behavior.
He didn't see it as problematic, and he wasn't sure why anyone else would either.
From American Libraries magazine, quote, in general, Dewey himself did not deny his actions, only their impropriety.
I have been very unconventional, as men always are who frankly show and speak of their liking for women, he wrote.
But he insisted, it was not his fault if the targets of his unconventional actions took offense.
That's like ladies' man rhetoric.
That's something that still mostly exists.
Yeah, there's literally a quote from it that's like, I think women know to take it as a compliment.
Like, he's just a real person.
Yeah, it's like, oh, oh, they can't, like, if they don't like it, they can't fucking hang.
You know, like, yeah, that's ugh.
Now, the times being what they were back then, few of his victims ever said anything publicly about his behavior.
That we have as much documentation as we do suggest that, again, he was a sex pest on a pretty staggering scale.
Nothing makes this point so well as the fact that in 1906, after harassing Haas and then several colleagues on a cruise, the other members of the ALA united to push Dewey out of the organization he had helped to found.
Wigam notes, quote, in exchange for a quiet departure, he was spared an ugly and public expose of one of his major flaws.
He was never again a power player in ALA politics.
And this is, I think, they actually get, I give the ALA in 1900.
1905 canceled.
He got canceled in 1906 for sexual harassment.
Do you know how bad you have to be to be canceled in 1906 for this?
Holy shit.
That is like, this is kind of blowing my mind.
Yeah.
This is intense.
And it's one of those things.
The people who were not getting canceled.
And like, we're using canceled facetiously, but like in 1906, in 1906.
Some shit going on.
Yeah.
Wow.
And it's the kind of thing where in 2022, you tell me that like an organization, a big company or whatever, quietly forces its founder out so that sexual, the fact that he's been sexually harassing and even assaulting women doesn't become public.
That's damning of that organization.
That's damning.
In 2022, in 1906, you get a lot of credit for doing that because that's something, you know?
Like that is something.
And there's a whole lot of nothing going on.
Yeah.
It's a different, it is morally, I think, different to quietly force the founder of your organization out in 1906 for sexual harassment than it is in 2022.
This might have, and I know I'm sure that there's other examples of it, but like this is the first, this is the earliest example I've heard.
I have not heard of an earlier one for sure.
For this specific thing.
Like they get, and I think it's a lot of the people who are doing this are women because it's, it's, you know, the ALA.
And this is the most they could do, too.
So I don't think this is an example.
Today, you hear about this, like he gets a chance to leave quietly.
And I think it's kind of cowardice on part of the organization.
I don't feel that way here.
Like, I'm sure maybe some of them feel that way, but I think a lot of it is just people doing what can be done, you know?
Quietly Forcing Founder Out00:04:59
I agree.
I think that the implications of this decision in 1906 versus 2022 are very, very, very different.
I would agree.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know what else the implications of are different?
Oh, no.
Is it a product or a service?
Yeah.
That's not a great ad, Pivot.
You know, they can all be good.
Look, what do you want from me?
Look, motherfuckers.
Okay, you're being defensive.
No one's yelling at you.
Thank you.
I just, I get so angry at the fans.
You set the bar so high for yourself, and then you lash out at people who love you.
I do that.
Yeah, that is what I do.
All right.
Well, you know who also does love these ads.
That was a good one.
Yeah.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield.
And in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
They said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.
Just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
I was, hi, dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
This is badass convict.
Right.
Just finished five years.
I'm going to have cookies and milk.
Come on.
On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversation about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
The entire season two is now available to Binge, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
I'm an alcoholic.
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Progressive Librarian Community00:14:26
Oh, we're back.
We sure are.
My goodness.
You know, my God.
Well, that was a brutal segment.
That was rough, right?
That's a rough one.
I'm sure it's not going to get worse.
Yeah.
Now, of course, the quiet nature of his resignation after decades of lauded work for the ALA meant that for a very long time, there was almost no discussion of his improprieties.
The first biography published after his death, written in 1932, was titled Melville Dewey, Seer, Inspirer, Doer.
And it leaves out all of the references to his behavior except for one sentence.
So this is the one his 1930s.
I'm surprised there's one sentence.
This is the one reference made in the 30s.
Dewey's consciousness of his own strength and freedom from evil purpose led to a serene indifference in his everyday public relations with women.
What does that even mean?
Read that again in a little bit.
Dewey's consciousness of his own strength and freedom from evil purpose led to a serene indifference in his everyday public relations with women.
Evil purpose.
He knew he was a good guy, so it was fine for him to sexually harass them.
Like, that's kind of what they're saying.
I think that's exactly what they're saying.
That is true.
Because he knew he was such a good man.
It was okay for him to treat them this way.
Yeah.
Oh, God.
It's legitimately a fucking insane sentence.
Was it evil what?
He was so conscious of his own strength and his freedom from evil purpose that he was indifferent to how he treated women.
Evil purpose to serene indifference.
Yeah.
That does sound like that's out of its mind, that sentence.
That sentence really goes.
That is wow.
I could spend days with that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's, there's, there's books that can be written about what that sentence is saying.
Oh, God.
Yeah.
That is gnarly.
Wow.
Okay.
Thank you for that.
I will note, because this is the period that it is, I found a whole ass scholarly paper that makes what seems to be a pretty thorough case that Dewey was not a eugenicist.
He wasn't really an opponent of eugenics either.
He just didn't seem to agree with a lot of the arguments being made.
He doesn't seem to have been a eugenicist.
And this is also worth noting.
He was not a eugenicist.
He was for sure a racist.
And this is where I get beyond the racism in the Dewey Decimal System is this is a guy who grows up in a racist system, never questions it.
So he builds some of that racism into this thing he built.
Now we're going to talk about Dewey being aggressively and like exceptionally for the time racist.
And to talk about that, we're going to talk about the Lake Placid Club.
In the early 1990s.
Sorry, I just wanted to be, so he's at this point, because he invents the Dewey Decimal System in his early 20s.
Now he's in his 50s, right?
He's like well into his life.
Okay, so this is like a totally different era of this man.
Yeah, this is the early 1900s.
He buys a private club in the Adirondacks.
From the beginning, Jews and black people were forbidden to be members of the club, which is not unusual for clubs at the time.
The club rules noted, no one shall be received as a member or guest against whom there is physical, moral, social, or race objection.
It is found impracticable to make exceptions to Jews or others excluded, even when of unusual personal qualifications.
Now, again, this is not uncommon with like fancy clubs at the time, but they usually don't write it down.
That's what makes it weird, is that he like they just won't let Jewish people.
Very, very mask off.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Racism, yeah.
And Dewey knew that these rules were offensive enough that, so obviously, when he's still with the ALA and when he's with it, there's a New York Library Association that he's a member of for a later period.
When they have, he'll do gatherings for these organizations that he'll host at the club that he owns and he'll hide the rulebook because he'll let like there's Jews that he lets in for these library events, you know, so he wants to hide the, so he knows that what he's doing is fucked up, right?
Like he hides it.
It's so insidious.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, this came to an end in a rather spectacular fashion in 1903.
And I want to quote now from a write-up by Book Riot.
This swanky party happened every year at the Lake Placid Club.
However, 1903 was special.
That year, Dewey hadn't hidden the club's rulebook.
This being a librarian, Shindig, someone found the thing on a side table and decided to read it.
That person turned out to be a friend of Henry Leipziger, a Jewish member of the NYLA, the New York Library Association Circulation Committee.
Together, they read the pamphlet and discovered the language forbidding racial and ethnic minorities, but especially and specifically Jews.
Coincidentally, Leipziger had been trying to become a member of the Lake Placid Club for years.
Now he knew why his application was on permanent hold.
That's right.
Dewey hadn't even told him about the no Jews rule.
Jesus Christ.
Leipziger did the opposite of shutting up about Dewey's racist social club.
Dewey was then the state librarian of New York, a publicly funded position.
New York City was a major center of Jewish culture, and Leipziger felt that Jewish tax dollars were going to waste on an unapologetic anti-Semite.
He hired lawyer Lewis Marshall, who lodged a petition with the Board of Regents to get Dewey fired in 1905.
Who boy this is why we don't record on Friday night?
Yeah.
Wow.
Dewey was forced to quit his state library position, even though he mounted a spirited defense by saying he had Jewish friends.
And again, to talk about how racist and sex he gets canceled for sexual harassment and racism in 1906.
This story took place last spring, as far as I'm concerned.
It's amazing.
It's absurd.
Wow.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And again, you'll also note that this Jewish guy who gets offended at the Lake Placid Club, I don't think is arguing on behalf of black people.
I don't think he's offended that black people aren't.
So like, what, you know, it's 1906, right?
Like, everything's terrible.
Or 1905.
But yeah, so Dewey quits his state library position.
This is, I think, a little after he got kicked out of the ALA.
And right around the time that this controversy breaks out, part of why he has to quit is it comes out that not only was he not allowing Jewish people to enter his club, he had bought a bunch of the land around the Lake Placid Club so that Jews couldn't buy it.
So that there wouldn't even be Jews who would like look at his club.
Like that, that's again, he keeps going the extra mile on this shit, you know?
This is like, yeah, like it's, oh my God, that's so much anti-Semitism.
And then he's just like going into regular spaces.
Like, this is not a thing that he's spending a lot of time and money to do.
This is, yeah.
And again, the thing worth noting is that he is not getting canceled for his racism against black people, which is not at all exceptional for the time.
And it's kind of gets lost in sort of the everyone's that racist.
He's not getting canceled because he's racist towards Southeast Asians.
He's really specifically racist towards Jewish people.
And in New York, probably wouldn't have happened if he'd lived somewhere else, but in New York, he gets canceled as a result of that.
You know, that was worth being specific about the racism that is considered a problem in this period, you know?
Sheesh.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So his history of sexual harassment and racism had cratered his public career by 1906, but Dewey continued to run the Lake Placid Club, which, among other things, was a place where he could indulge in his language revision fantasies without pushback.
One 1927 menu listed haddock, H-A-D-O-K, potted beef, P-O-T-E-D, with noodles, N-O-O-D-L-S, parsley, P-A-R-S-L-I, or mashed, M-A-S-H-T, potato, butter, B-U-T-R, steamed rice, S-T-E-E-A-M-D-R-Y-S, lettuce, L-E-T-I-S, and Weiss cream.
I don't know what Y-S cream is supposed to be.
Is that how he thinks you should say ice cream?
Is that maybe ice cream?
I think that might be ice cream.
Y-S to be ice cream.
Weiss cream?
See, I think it's a good idea.
Fuck Dewey.
This is a good yardstick for how I feel about him because it was hilarious the first time.
And when he's doing it in the 1920s, I'm not laughing.
There's nothing funny.
No, it's not funny anymore.
Now you're just a sad weird man in Lake Placid making typos on purpose.
In 1927, Dewey hired a stenographer who he described in his unique spelling way as a dainty little L-I-T-L flapper and better looking than I expected.
B-E-T-R.
After he hugged and kissed her in public, she threatened to file charges and ended up settling with Dewey for $2,147.66.
And again, like that's not nothing then.
And also, like, again, this is egregious enough that he doesn't think he can win in court despite being a rich dude against this woman.
Like, that says something.
He's pro, like, you know, like people being sexually harassed, just taking the rich person's money because the justice system is so fucking broken.
It's like, go as far as you can in the justice system and then take all their money while you're fucking with them.
Yeah, well, get what you can, you know.
Yeah.
According to Wayne Wigand, author of Irrepressible Reformer, a biography of Melville Dewey, Dewey was upset with the settlement, not because he had been reprimanded for anything improper, but because he worried the stenographer might spread rumors that she got $2,000 for no work.
Similarly unrepentant after he, yeah, I know, right?
Like, what the fuck?
Still efficiency-minded, even when he is in court for being a sex pest.
Similarly unrepentant after he was censured by the ALA, Dewey insisted he hadn't done anything wrong.
Peer women would understand my ways, he said.
I have no comment.
He's a real piece of shit.
He's just like, there's just like this impulse in people that I don't understand to double down on the worst parts of themselves to the point where like anything remotely useful that they had done in their entire lives are rendered upsetting to even think about.
Like what is that element of human nature?
It is so ugly and dark and I'm upset, Robert.
Well, here's a good thing.
Is he going to die soon?
He does.
He dies on December 26th, 1931 of a stroke in Lake Placid.
Okay, good.
Yeah, please say there's no more information.
No, he's fucking dead as shit now.
Now, for decades, he is, as we've talked about a bit, largely lionized and applauded for his achievements.
But in recent years, the tide has begun to turn, not because of new evidence brought up against the man, but because his behavior started being recognized by broader culture as problematic again.
In 2019, the American Library Association dropped his name from an award as the result of his racism and sexual harassment.
Sherry Harrington, part of the task force that drafted the resolution to do this, explained, it wasn't like he's being judged by 21st century standards.
He was called out repeatedly for his sexual harassment behavior during his time.
Yeah.
Oh, I'm, I, that's, I mean, that's crumbs, but I'm glad that it happened.
Yeah.
It's very good.
It does, it does happen.
And it is like, when I heard there was a man who got canceled for sexual harassment in 1906, I was like, well, we've got to talk about this.
Well, that would have, that will have had to have been pretty fucking bad.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's got to be a tale.
Yeah.
And it sure was.
Wow, Robert, this, I had, I simply didn't know.
I didn't, this was all, was this all information that you learned about relatively recently?
I had known Dewey was like a sexist asshole.
I didn't know most of it.
I certainly did not know that like the racism in the Dewey Decimal, I had no idea about any of that.
Which is probably this paper right there.
I'm sure there's a lot that has.
I mean, I know there's a lot that has.
I'm sure there's more to be written about the impact that has had, which is certainly like the most toxic thing he did in terms of its impact on society.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
It's pretty bad.
Pretty, pretty shitty dude.
Melville Dewey.
Wow.
Not a fan.
I'm going to go.
I'm sorry.
Takeaways.
I'm going to go burn down a library.
Yeah, go burn down a library.
All librarians are your enemy now.
I think that's clear.
Yeah.
Always has been true.
Hunt them down in their places wherever they hide.
If someone makes a parks and recreation joke, I will kill myself.
So don't even know.
Are there librarians in that show?
There's librarians in that show.
Couldn't, couldn't get.
I mean, and that's see, and that's what I love about you.
Um there no, it's fine.
I uh, I do.
I I do love a library.
I do feel that it's still so wild to me that libraries um are so underfunded and also like are the only place where so many things are able to happen in a socially acceptable like.
It's the only socially acceptable place to get free wi-fi or go to the bathroom or read like the two coolest things our government does are is the post office and libraries.
Um, that government in general does like easily yeah, big fan.
Um, so it sucks that there was a deeply unsettling, bigoted person who has such a large effect on libraries, but i'm glad that libraries are grappling with.
Yeah, it seems like this is a thing because it is like a very like the library biz, like the people who are in libraries tend to be well educated and pretty progressive.
I think the A Masters, maybe somewhat progressive as an organization.
I'm sure librarians uh, there are progressive librarians might disagree with aspects of that, but I think, broadly speaking um, it seems like there are, there are ongoing attempts to address the, the impact of these problems.
Um, can I, can I plug a quick library related thing for sure.
Okay, if you're currently and, if there, if it's one of the products and services in the episode, i'm sorry, but if you're currently an audible subscriber uh, stop giving your money to Jeff Bezos and there are, so I get all of my audiobooks from the library on an app, absolutely.
And so, if you are, if you're not tapped into your local library's like audiobook system uh, or e-book system uh, stop giving money to billionaires and start giving money to nobody.
Joey Chestnut Library Plug00:04:04
It's your right.
It's your right.
Listen to Sharon Stone's biography, speaking as a guy who's written multiple books that are in libraries.
Every now and then, you get some fucking shithead writer on twitter who is like well you're, you're taking money from me by like, getting my books from a library.
If, if you find a writer who has that attitude, stop reading their books and start hitting them with a brick yourself.
Hit them with a brick.
Give them a bricking.
You know that's a bricking.
Uh, free books are dope.
Free books are amazing.
Uh and and um, make sure that you're.
Yeah, you're using your library for all it's worth, because that's why it's there.
Yeah, good times and all right, Dewey.
Uh Jamie, you got any other pluggables you want to drop in the P-zone.
Uh, in the Pozon.
In the Pozon, do you guys remember when Pozones were a thing?
Of course I remember when Pozon that was like Pizza Hut right, that did the Pozzo floor.
Joey Chestnut competed in Pozon competition.
Jamie, who the is Joey Chestnut?
You talk about Joey Chestnut all the time and I have no idea who you're talking about.
Is that?
That sounds like a fake guy?
Not a fake guy, he's a real guy.
I don't real guy.
I don't like Joey Chestnut, don't like he's not, although actually there is a behind the bastards in the hot dog eating world that I will talk to you about off mic because it's fascinating.
Um, oh god um, I'll lead the episode, for Christ's sake.
I just wrote 12,000 words about it.
Absolutely.
Jamie, Greenwood.
Anytime, you come here and we'll do a reverse bastards.
That sounds incredible.
That would be really fun.
I know way too much.
Joey Chestnut is the champion.
I mean, in hot dogs, but also everything.
He's the champion of the world.
Oh, and speed eating.
Okay, that makes sense.
Yeah.
Of the world.
His name sounds like a fake person.
It's his real name.
Joseph Chestnut of San Diego.
Joseph Chestnut.
Come on.
Joseph Chestnut, San Jose, California.
He lives in Indiana now.
Look, he's won Pazon contests.
There's a whole, I would highly, okay, the other thing I'll plug besides library cards is the 30 for 30 episode about Takiro Kobayashi and Joey Chestnut.
It is one of the most fascinating stories ever told.
Or don't watch it.
And I will recap it for you on a future episode of Behind the Bastards because it is just wild.
Well, I think I'm about to learn a lot about the competitive eating industry, which I have devoted about a third of a second thinking to in my life up to this point.
I would say 99% of my knowledge of competitive eating comes from that one King of the Hill episode.
That's pretty good.
And that is a pretty well-informed episode.
I will plug, I'll plug two things.
I'll plug, I have solo podcasts that have come out in the last year, Act Cast, which is about the Kathy podcast or the Kathy comic, not podcast, and Lolita podcast, which is about Lolita and its cultural impact.
And I'll also plug a TV show I wrote on last year that just got released on HBO Max called Teenage Euthanasia.
It's a very fun show about teenage euthanasia.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
It's about a family that owns a funeral home and zombies in Florida.
So it's very fun and it's on HBO Max finally.
It was really hard to watch for a while.
So you can watch it now.
And you can catch my show, Mrs. Joseph Chestnut, America USA, in LA at the Elysian Theater on February 17th at 9 o'clock p.m.
I'm really excited for it.
I play Joey Chestnut's widow because I murdered him.
So if you live in the LA area, it's mandatory.
You have to come.
Watch Jamie's sweet ass show.
And that's it.
Go, you know, fight a librarian.
Just challenge a librarian to a duel.
They have to accept.
That's one of the rules about being a librarian.
Duel the Librarian Challenge00:02:49
If you challenge them to a formal duel, they can't say no.
They cannot turn you down.
And if not, you can report them.
No, they get to pick the weapon.
So be careful there.
But they will fight you.
Every library.
I've encountered a katana librarian or two in my day.
I've never won.
That's how you lost those fingers.
Well, that's the episode of Behind the Bastards.
Go with God.
Wow.
God bless Jesus Christ.
Bye.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, Chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
Coming up this season on Math and Magic, CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario.
People think that creative ideas are like these light bulb moments that happen when you're in the shower, or it's really like a stone sculpture.
You're constantly just chipping away and refining.
Take to interactive CEO Strauss Selnick and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey.
Listen to Math and Magic on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
On paper, the three hosts of the Nick Dick and Paul Show are geniuses.
We can explain how AI works, data centers, but there are certain things that we don't necessarily understand.
Better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Yes.
Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
I actually, I thought it was.
I got that wrong.
But hey, no one's perfect.
We're pretty close, though.
Listen to the Nick Dick and Paul Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey there, folks.
Amy Roebuck and TJ Holmes here.
And we know there is a lot of news coming at you these days from the war with Iran to the ongoing Epstein fallout, government shutdowns, high-profile trials, and what the hell is that Blake Lively thing about anyway?
We are on it every day, all day.
Follow us, Amy and TJ, for news updates throughout the day.
Listen to Amy and TJ on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.